Richard and Jonathan discuss the history of Critical Theory, the Frankfurt School, Cultural Marxism, and what has come to be known as Political Correctness. Cultural Marxism has often been deemed “revolution by other means,” but Richard and Jonathan emphasize the Frankfurt School reactionary, conservative, and elitist tendencies. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
Welcome to Vanguard, a podcast of radical traditionalism.
The Vanguard Here's your host, Richard Spencer.
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Vanguard.
And welcome back, Jonathan Bowden as well, my partner in thought crime.
How are you, Jonathan?
Yes, pleased to be here.
Well, I mentioned thought crime.
That's quite an apt term for the subject of discussion this week, and that is cultural Marxism, critical theory, and the Frankfurt School.
Those are, of course, three distinct...
Well, Jonathan, to get the discussion started, I think it'd be a good idea to look at cultural Marxism historically.
Ask where it's coming from, and in particular, what was the milieu like in interwar Germany where so many of these figures like Adorno and Benjamin and Horkheimer arose?
I think you've got waves of feminism that we discussed in a previous podcast, and now you've got waves of Marxism or waves within waves.
Marxism, when it started out, of course, had a lot of cultural theory attached to it, and Marx was heavily influenced by a utopian.
Socialist theory early on in the so-called Paris manuscripts and that sort of thing.
That was all junked and Marxism became a heavily economically concentric discourse.
Very reductive economically.
A sort of leg science now regarded 150 years on from those events as a sort of pseudoscience.
And this remained in play until the early stages of the 20th century.
and Marxist parties tended to replicate that at a lower sort of political level.
But in and around the First World War, with Gramsci's ideas, which he wrote down in the prison notebooks when he was interned, a type of cultural discourse began to emerge, whereby Gramsci had the idea that the superstructure and the base of society were disconnected, so that things could exist at a cultural level which were not totally economically determined and couldn't be held completely to be economically managed.
Partly, this was the desire of frustrated intellectuals who wanted to use Marxism, who also wanted to discuss culture, which was their abiding source of interest.
But it was also an attempt to broaden the appeal of Marxian ideas.
And in the 30s and the 20s in Germany, schools of rioters began to emerge.
We're only concerned with man in society in John Flaminance's view term.
We're not concerned really with econometrics or economic determinism at all.
We're only Marxian in this newfangled way and had a heavily theoretical take on life.
I remember a Marxian deconstructionist lecturer once telling me 30 years ago that The bourgeois goes to life with common sense, the Marxist with his theory.
And this theoretical overload whereby everything in life has to be theorized and every text that one comes across has to be subjected to critical analysis or the theory of critique, critical theory, gave rise to this school that was concerned with the examination of literary texts, with cultural anthropology.
With sociology, with social psychology, with adaptations of most of the social sciences to life, and was only vaguely concerned with economics.
For instance, Fritz Allmann's large bull bear moth, which is an analysis of the economics of National Socialist Germany, was one of the few books of economics that was ever written that came out of the Frankfurt School.
Most of it was concerned with cultural critique and critical cultural theory involving very outlandish areas such as sociology of music, which was a particular area of Adorno's.
Let me jump in here and mention a few things.
It's worth pointing out that the Marxist project had failed on its own terms by the 1930s in the sense that Gramsci.
And I believe Gramsci, some of his writings weren't really known until much later, into the 50s.
But anyway, Gramsci was put in prison by fascists.
In a sense, in Italy, the fascists had won.
And they had defeated a lot of the Marxist parties.
They had some proletarian support, I'm sure.
Things like this.
And, you know, the whole Marxian project of an economic determinism, of capitalism creating these contradictions that create some kind of apocalyptic-like scenario, and then the proletariat rise up, that really hadn't happened.
And also, with Frankfurt School members, at least...
Ostensibly, they were highly critical of what the Soviet Union had become, that the Soviet Union really wasn't it.
It wasn't the utopia.
It was maybe something they deemed a perversion.
So those were certainly important factors.
And also, it's worth pointing out that in this, if we're talking about the Frankfurt School milieu of Adorno and Benjamin, you had people who probably...
Weren't that interested in economics.
Benjamin, some of his great writings are on 19th century culture in one book, but aphoristic writings about life in the modern age.
And certainly Adorno was kind of a classical music snob.
He was very interested in Beethoven and something like that.
So anyway, it's a very, very interesting milieu that all of this came out of.
But maybe, Jonathan, you can talk about two things.
Where was it going?
I think the essence of their cultural project was to revolutionarily change the way in which Western culture was thought about and received.
So it was a grandstanding ambition at any rate.
It was to totally change the way in which Western culture was perceived by those who created it and by those who were the receptors of its creation.
I think this involved an attempt basically to go back to the theory that pre-existed the French Revolution.
Because the big book by Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, it's really about the pre-revolutionary theories and is a critique of the Enlightenment from the left.
Not the right.
So they begin by going back, as radical theorists always do, to first principles and criticise the Enlightenment.
And their criticism of the Enlightenment is essentially an attempt by a scientific man, or would-be scientific man, to place himself at the heart of the universe, to dominate nature, and in so doing, enact an enormous revenge.
The great theory about fascism in a dialectic of Enlightenment.
By Dorner and Horkheimer, is the idea that fascism represents the revenge of a violated nature and is the revenge of a sociobiological current that would not exist if there weren't attempts to entrap nature within the nexus of progress.
So already you're getting some strange ideas here.
You're getting a sort of anti-progressive leftism.
You're getting leftism which is critical of capitalism and modernity, whereas classical Marxism is extraordinarily in favor of capitalism and modernity.
They just wish to succeed it with another stage, socialism and late modernity, if you like.
Or hyper-modernity.
Hyper-modernity, yes.
Let's talk a little bit about this because...
As we were talking about off-air when we were first thinking about doing a podcast on this, is that the mainstream conservative movement, at least in America, is actually somewhat familiar with the Frankfurt School, at least its intellectuals are, and they think they know it as the source of the 1960s and political correctness and so on and so forth.
But I always feel that...
I don't really recognize cultural Marxism in the way that it's often depicted by movement ideologues.
So let's talk a little bit about this, put a little pressure on that idea of enlightenment and dialectic enlightenment.
I mean, one of the key scenes, if you will, in that book, which I guess is worth reading.
It's an extremely difficult text to read.
Just as an aside, I had a...
I met this German when I was in graduate school.
He mentioned that he only read Adorno in translation, in English translation, because even in the original German language, it's extremely dense.
But anyway, let's put a little pressure on.
What is that?
Because Adorno and Horkheimer aren't just seeing that fascism is some...
reaction of capitalist forces against the communist wave or something like that.
They're seeing fascism as coming out of a bourgeois world.
They're seeing something really wrong at the heart of bourgeois modernity.
And I think they picture this in the form of Odysseus, who wants to be bound at the mast and is kind of going to...
Renounce man's more natural being and instead embrace a kind of stern, hard...
You know, modern man of there's a world to be made, we've got to go build it.
So maybe talk a little more about this, this concept of enlightenment on the part of Horkheimer and Adorno, and how this led to a kind of new left, one that might even have some conservative tendencies in the sense of being critical of the abuses against nature.
Yes, it's an odd one, actually, because it's a...
It's a sort of would-be foundational leftism, strongly influenced by Hegel, strongly influenced by the early Marx, strongly influenced by Plekenazi, Lenin, a lot of his Marxism, and was a Menshevik, technically, strongly influenced by Gramsci, whose text would have been known to Marxist intellectuals at that time, strongly influenced by...
The culture of critique, you see, instead of seeing the Enlightenment as progressive, they see the Enlightenment as an endarkenment, as a period that's proprietary to bourgeois revolutions which may not be entirely progressive and were afflicted with terror.
So they have a differentiated appreciation of these things.
They also have to find the enemy somewhere else, because if the enemy is not really as classical Marxism depicted it, And as Leninism and Stalinism led to the alleged resolution of, they have to find their enemy somewhere else.
And the enemy for the new left, influenced by the school, is alienation.
Alienation from modernity, alienation from culture, which is capitalist in its predicates, alienation from what they call the cultural industry, whereby modern man is totally trapped within the cultural space created by the economy and where there is no room at all.
For, in conservative terms, folk-based authenticity.
They would never use those sorts of terms, of course, and they would consider them to be reactionary, hubristic terms.
But because there is a cultural pessimism, particularly about the cultural life of the masses under capitalist economics and even under socialist economics in the Eastern Bloc to a lesser extent, There is an opening out to vistas of cultural conservatism, which is the Frankfurt School's inner secret.
I remember Professor Roger Scruton, the conservative intellectual, about 25 years ago now, included conservative features of the Frankfurt School under one of the headings of cultural conservatism in his dictionary of political philosophy, and this caused a little bit of a stir.
But when you look at the fact that...
Although they sort of found Wagner sort of rather loathsome in relation to what they regarded it as leading to, the classical sort of Schumann, Schubert, Mozart, Beethoven, Bruckner, sort of icons of Germanic Middle European culture are exactly the icons that in particular they're most in favour of.
Just as classical Marxism is in favour of bourgeois politics and revolutionism over and against the mercantilism and semi-feudalism that had preceded it, as it looked to the socialism that it thought was going to replace it, they're in favour of radical bourgeois subjectivity,
epitomised by Beethoven, in their view, and his symphonies, which proclaims the sort of sonority of the bourgeois subject, that moment when The bourgeois subject feels itself to be empowered and all-conquering,
and the fleeting identification of the meta-subject, the subjectivity of the subject, that Beethoven calls Napoleon Bonaparte as he sees him to be a sort of an embodiment of the world of bourgeois man.
And all of these ideas are there in Adorno's Sociology of Music.
Which is in some ways a sort of Marxian cultural appreciation of great Western icons, which could be considered as slightly rueful and slightly conservative with a small c.
It's as if he arrives at certain sensitive cultural conclusions which are themselves outside of the nature of the theory which he's allegedly espousing.
He's certainly not alienated by these sorts of musicologists at all.
The point, of course, is that they are the springboard for the modernist experiments of Schoenberg, Weber, and Berg.
But that was a radical thing to say when they said it.
That's now regarded as an old hat statement in classical music criticism.
But that's what they were with Mahler as an intermediary between the...
Mahler between Bruckner and Schoenberg.
That's sort of worth thinking.
And a rejection of Sibelius, who was insulted quite severely by Adorno, and the adoration of early to late Schoenberg as the future of music.
This became the standard repertoire.
So the irony is that it's in culture that their theory has had its most direct impact.
Politically, they've had very little impact.
It's in the politics of culture that they've not conquered the board, but they've entered into the fabric of what now exists at University Level.
Yes, I agree.
Even in the fact of criticizing Wagner, the fact that you treat him as this major figure that must be confronted is in a way reactionary and has conservative tendencies.
I don't see anyone in the contemporary conservative movement To have much interest in these romantic titans at all, in that sense.
Let's talk a little bit about the Frankfurt School's journey to America.
That's also quite an interesting one.
The Frankfurt School was almost entirely Jewish.
I don't know if there are actually any exceptions to that.
There might be.
Yeah, there are.
It's unique in that sense.
It's always stereotypical.
The daughter was half Jewish, and a few of the others were this and that.
But basically, yes, they were almost intelligent.
Right.
And not only were they Jews, but they were Marxists.
Needless to say, they weren't accepted in the Third Reich, although they weren't really directly, I guess the I don't think any of them were, at least personally, persecuted.
I know Adorno was even traveling back to Germany on occasion in that time.
But anyway, they did move, and they went to America, and there was actually a kind of exile community in which...
I believe, you know, Schoenberg and Tomas Mann and Theodor Adorno were all living together in a Los Angeles suburb or something like that.
It's quite interesting.
But they also were received...
Ironically, by the elite, a lot of the Frankfurt School members actually worked for the OSS, which would eventually become the CIA during the Second World War.
And they were also getting grants.
I believe Adorno got a Rockefeller grant.
They were working at the Columbia University.
They definitely had a reception by more elite American opinions.
Was it Rockefeller Grant that actually sponsored the authoritarian personality?
Yes, that's right.
Yeah.
So let's talk a little bit about this.
They're kind of the next stage of their journey when they became Americans.
Yes, the American stage was interesting because in many ways it contradicts the pure theorising that they were into.
Because although they were given grants and cultural access by these people and seen as sort of honorific, sort of revels against fascism, they've had to be supported in the war of ideas.
They had to change and water down their theory.
They also had to adopt a lot more empirical studies.
Which was an asthma to people like Adorno, who hated empiricism.
But of course, empiricism is the Anglo-American way of looking at things.
And they had to adapt.
It's adapt or die, basically.
They had to adapt.
And they had to come up with theoretically based notions that could lead to epidemiological testing and chronological types of testing and almost tick-box forms.
Which ended in the slightly reductive program known as the sort of pursuit of an authoritarian personality with its notorious S scale, S for fascism.
And many of these tests are regarded as slightly embarrassing now and are quite redundant and also not very much use because although certain people do have more authoritarian cast of personalities than others, it's not really a predicate for political positioning.
Because there's all sorts of hard social democratic positions and authoritarian far-left positions, for example, which go with more authoritarian character structure and don't elide into the X scale, which these people like to make out.
However, they were very influential in the rebuilding of Germany after the Second World War.
This is where their theory enters into the mainstream in many ways, because one of their great points is what you do in a democratic society with all the institutions of control, with all the valences of stateful and other forms of oppressiveness, as they would see it, the military-industrial complex, the people who work in the security services, the people who work and analyse information.
On behalf of those services, the people who work in the large prison and psychiatric environments that exist in all societies, particularly in Western societies, they always had the view that these people needed to be watched in a way and needed to be prevented from having some of the natural affinities that they would otherwise do if you left them outside of the remit of your theory.
This idea that you always watch the authoritarian gatekeepers in society for signs of incorrectness has entered into the mainstream, very much so.
Yes, I agree that the conservative movement, the mainstream view of the Frankfurt School, that view is really one of Adorno and the authoritarian personality.
That's where their criticism really fits.
But of course, you know, there's so much more to be involved in.
But that's certainly a way where you see critical theorists most directly kind of attacking normal bourgeois people.
If you have some, you know, what we might call healthy patriotic opinions, you know, that's, you know, high up on the F scale.
That's right, yeah.
Again, so I think in some ways the authoritarian personalities probably Adorno and the rest of them at their most cartoonish or something.
It's not really the most interesting.
That's right.
There's also a sort of theory by expletives of that school, like Martin Gay and others, that what they're well known for, such as the F scale and so on, was just really a concession to their friends, to the people who were giving them grants.
Because what really interested them was this extraordinarily elaborate theory where everything in life, particularly everything in cultural life, was theorised in books like Negative Dialectics by Adorno and Aesthetic Theory, which was unfinished at his death and is dedicated to Samuel Beckett.
And his support for elements of the avant-garde and the counterculture during the 1960s.
Which is a perverse Marxian support because it's not based on the fact that it's radical and that it's coming from the edge and that it's countering that which exists formally, although there's a little bit of that.
The reason he supports these things is he believes that the cultural industry is so monolithic, the culture of entertainment and the degradation of the masses is so absolute, that only in these little fissures, only in these tiny little spaces which are opened up by the critical avant-garde.
Who often deny easy understanding and deny mediation and deny the audience the collateral of a closure at the end of a piece so that people go away happy or satisfied and that sort of thing.
What they're doing is they're opening a space for genuine culture to exist.
That's why I dedicated it to Beckett, you see.
So underneath a lot of this theorising, there is a pessimistic despair, a sort of morphology of despair.
And that's very unusual for a leftist position.
It's usually associated with a Spenglerian, conservative cultural disdain and pessimism for the degradation of the masses under all forms of life, and a wish that the life of culture could extend and be deeper and be more transvaluated than it is.
Right.
You know, this is all quite interesting.
And at the risk of pushing this Adorno as conservative idea too far, actually, recently there was a book of his music criticism.
I guess it's not too recent.
It was probably published.
It was a book of translations.
It was published in 2004 or so.
And I remember reading it, and he had an interesting essay where he, in some ways, rethought Wagner and had many more positive things to say about Wagner.
And believe it or not, he actually had positive things to say about Houston Stuart Chamberlain, in the sense that, you know, Houston Stuart Chamberlain was, you know, a racialist thinker, a kind of, you know, god of the far-right, racialist right.
And he was saying that he saw one of his reactions against...
the culture of England and his romantic embrace of Germany was a kind of reaction against the tyranny of industrialization and that he imagined a more, you know, unalienated, authentic world in Germany and that, you know, almost these right-wing strivings were that reaction against capitalism or something like that.
So again, there are a lot of complexity to all of these people.
They're not easily pigeonholed.
But I do want to talk about the 1960s.
But before that, let's just put a little more pressure on the culture industry because I think that's a very It's a very useful term for us.
I think that's a term we should be using and maybe even using it in a lot of the same ways as Adorno did.
But maybe just talk a little bit more about that idea of the culture industry, what it is and what Adorno was seeing in mid-20th century America.
Yes, basically he had the view that the masses were totally degraded by a capitalist and market-driven culture, whereby from advertising through to popular cinema to the popular television that was beginning and that would replace cinema and add to it as an extension of it,
You have a totally seamless environment in which the masses live, which today will be characterized by the populist internet, by the big TV channels, by MTV, by pop music videos, by pop music in all of its various forms.
Don't forget, Dorna was extraordinarily scathing about jazz.
Yes.
Which is regarded as deeply unprogressive.
and his disgust and distaste for jazz is almost visceral.
Yes, almost.
In contemporary terms and in the terms of the New Left, there is this sort of despairing mid-20th century Viennese intellectual who despises the culture of the masses, and that comes very close to an elitist position.
It may be a left-wing elitist position, but it's an elitist position nonetheless, and once you admit elitism in any area...
Even if it's only the cultural one, cultural selectivity, you begin to adopt ramifications elsewhere that are unstoppable.
Although you can never be seen as a neoconservative figure, these are people who believe that the family is a gun in the hands of the bourgeoisie, Criminality is directly proportionate to its punishment.
In other words, you get more criminality because you punish people who are only victims anyway.
So don't forget, these are the sorts of conceits that the Frankfurt School believes in.
But the very complexity of their analysis alienates them from populist left-wing politics and alienates them from easy sloganeering, which is why they've been taken up by intellectuals.
And yet not by mainstream leftist political movements because their work is just too difficult.
It's too abstruse.
It's too obsessed with fine art and high culture, particularly musical, but also in the cinema.
Going back to an analyst called Cracor in the 1920s, the intellectual analysis of Weimar cinema and expressionist cinema at that.
It was very important to them, and they saw that type of cinema, and its imaginative use of the unconscious, as people would begin to call it, later in the century after Freud's cultural influence, led them into sort of slightly interesting and creative cultural vistas that are not simple and are not reducible to political slogans, but they do ultimately tend.
Yes.
Well, let's talk about the 1960s and the new left and the hippies and the 68 violent protests and so on and so forth.
What do you think the connections are between the two of them?
I know, supposedly, I wasn't there, of course, in Berkeley in 1968, they were chanting Marx, Mao, Marcuse.
And Herbert Marcuse was, of course, he was from the same milieu as Adorno.
He was a Hegelian professor, upper bourgeois Jewish background.
But particularly later, and he remained in America, Adorno would return to Central Europe, but he remained, and he started writing books like Eros and Civilization that were kind of Marxian-Freudian liberation philosophy kind of thing, that the future was about, what was it, polymorphous perversity, these kinds of things.
And certainly very different than Adorno's more kind of fastidious bourgeois.
Nature.
So what are the connections between the youth movement of the 1960s and the Frankfurt School?
Because in some ways it's strange bedfellows.
You have different generations.
People who, you know, the hippies and anti-war protesters probably couldn't spell Hegel.
You know, a very wide gulf between the people like Adorno and these new kids.
So what are the connections?
Do you think, as the conservative movement, would like to believe that the Frankfurt School were kind of prophets of 1968, or is it a little more difficult?
They are and they aren't.
I think what happens is that intermediate theorists emerge, who are not as complicated, and his work can be assimilated to political struggle and sloganeering.
And Marcuse is that example.
Marcuse writes several books, the most prominent of which is One Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization, one of which is a full-on left American attack.
On modern corporate America, where he advertises what will come to be known as the military-industrial complex, and what was called the welfare-warfare state, whereby welfare is paid in order to keep the masses bedded down, and at the same time, the perfect society is always engineered out of existence by endless wars in the second and the third world, which are always for the prospect of peace.
But the peace never arrives and there's always another war just around the corner.
And, of course, the war is to make profits for the military-industrial complex, which is increasingly considered to be the most advanced capitalist part of America, in which the political class...
It's totally embedded.
Right.
So what you're saying is that they were absolutely correct.
So it's a sort of...
Of course, there are many similarities on the other side, politically, because Harry Elmer Barnes edited a very large volume called Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, which is very similar from a revisionist sort of school, whether isolationist or American nationalist or American libertarian.
The people who contributed to that book had a very similar analysis to the one that Marcuse would have of American foreign policy.
Of course, this was occurring in an era of a Cold War, while the threat was seen to be the Soviet Union and to a lesser extent now is China.
And by arguing for pacifism and for isolation, you're arguing for communist victory elsewhere in the world by the logic of power politics.
And that's how Cold War warriors would have responded.
Anticommunists would have responded to the Marcuse sort of front.
But Marcuse enabled Frankfurt-related ideas to be politically assimilated by the growing forces of the student new left.
And that's why they used him as the theorist of choice, because he's expletable in student terms.
He also put himself forward as a student leader, at least theoretically, something which the other Frankfurters were too fae.
And too theoretical and too abstract and abstruse ever to do.
Students were to listen to their lectures, even if they're talking Marxian analysis.
Adorno, of course, died as a result of a student action in Germany in the late 1960s, when the lecture theatre or podium was stormed by some action front hippies or yippies.
who embraced Adorno, whether they had flowers in their hair I'm not too sure metaphorically, and they chanted that as an institution Adorno is dead and Adorno collapsed and had a heart attack relatively soon afterwards and died.
And this is taken as a sort of metaphorisation in a way, that despite his would-be sort of leadership role as a theorist in relation to these people, he was a very, very, very There were two different universes, and the Frankfurt School intellectuals were deeply shocked, actually, that the West German popular press, particularly the centre-right press, held them responsible, morally, for the emergence of the terrorist organisations in West Germany, such as the Bader-Meinhof,
which later morphed into the Red Army faction, or RAF.
And it's only, of course, come out...
the war came down, but the Stasi, when the traditional forces of power in East Germany were heavily behind the RAF, gave them military expertise and explosives, told them which sites to attack and so on.
So they were as much an extension of the oldest parts of the old left as they were of the newest parts of the new left.
Nevertheless, the Theorists are not always insightful about how the world will use their theory.
And the Frankfurt School is a classic example of ivory tower intellectuals who partly get a little bit broken up and mangled on the wheel of history.
But Narcusa is an intermediate thinker who the student left are able to make use of because they can understand what he's saying.
And Horkheimer and Lernsau are too abstract, basically.
They're on their own as theorists.
Jonathan, to bring the discussion to a close, what do you think is the legacy of these thinkers?
And in some ways, it's a very big question, because...
I'm also kind of asking, what is the legacy of the new left and all of this?
And what is political correctness today?
What does it mean and how is it connected with these 20th century Marxisms?
Yes, it's a difficult one because it's so diffuse.
And I think what has happened is that they've changed the entire temperature which existed, particularly the university level.
And amorphously at the general media level that feeds out of that at the higher end.
What's happened is that once they lost the hard-left accretions of sympathy for the Soviet Union, witness a text like Martius' Soviet Marxism, which although are very short.
It's extremely critical.
I mean, he'd have been sent to a psychiatric unit or put in a camp for a text like that had he produced that inside one of those societies, as Marcuse well knew.
Now, you've got this great sort of uniformity and diffuseness of the contemporary left, which has collapsed into liberalism, seamlessly taken part of its agenda over.
It's no longer associated with apologetic statements about Stalinism, distances itself from all left-wing atrocities and has critiques of those societies as well.
It's part of the seamless liberal left discourse that straddles the centre and goes right out to the softer reaches of the far left, bifurcated from the hard left beyond it.
And in all of these institutions, Frankfurt School views play a role.
They play a role in defeating the culture of conservatism in all areas, racial and ethnic, criminological and social, areas of police studies, PhDs written about the prison service, modern theories about cinema.
In all of these areas, in cultural studies is a discourse which has only emerged from art colleges in the last 20 years, which is heavily saturated with Frankfurt School-ish type of ideas.
You see the deconstruction and the breaking down of the prior culture of conservatism.
They are the intellectual tip of the liberal society, which has stepped away from the conservative society of the 50s and pre-60s.
Up until the 60s in the West, you had largely a stereotypical centre-right to rightish conservative society, polity, academy, media and culture.
And after that, you have a step change to a liberal instead of a conservative society, media, culture and culturally disseminating strata.
And this has continued throughout the decades since the 1960s.
We have about 50 years now.
So you have a situation where over this 50-year period, throughout all of the institutions that matter, soft-left theory, theory without hard edges and without endorsement of anti-humanist crimes committed by the ultra-left all over the world, has become...
The default position for many people in the arts, in psychology, in medical practice, in psychiatric practice, to do with nearly all institutions of the state, with the exception of the military and the raw force-based criterion, the areas of state power that rely on the use of force.
Almost all other areas have been infected by these types of theory.
Psychiatric institutions have been.
And although it's a bit of a stretch, the anti-psychiatric movement through R.D. Lange, through Fromm, and through Marcuse is heavily influenced by at least a proportion of these sorts of ideas that in the theory of Lyotard and in the theory of Deleuze...
is the bourgeois really insane is get our schizophrenics the saint who walk amongst us you know Deleuze's guitarist takes Antioedipus Schizophrenic is seen as the last readout of sanity in a mad capitalist world, which is, by any rational credence, insane.
Therefore, you have to look to the insane to find the readout of sanity.
These sorts of ideas post-Foucault in the late...
20th century are no longer that eccentric.
They were once the most eccentric ideas you could have that conservatives essentially just laughed at.
Now they've taken over the institutions.
But it's in a gradualist, in a would-be well-meaning and in a soft-minded sort of way, because this theory has taken over and cultural conservatives have retreated before it to such a degree that there's hardly any of them left.
I agree.
You know, I might disagree with you slightly.
I think cultural Marxism has infected the military in the United States.
It's kind of incredible.
But we had a major army general claiming that diversity is the great strength of America's armed forces as they go overseas to bring women into undergraduate colleges.
So it's been quite a triumph.
You know, one thing I would just mention, picking up on all of these ideas...
I've always thought about this.
There's this staying power of, let's call it the postmodern New Left or cultural Marxism.
It's had this long, decades-long staying power.
And if you think about major avant-garde modernist movements, they were a candle that burned really quickly.
They almost burn themselves out.
If you just look at, just to pick one at random, the Blue Rider group or something like that.
This is something that lasted maybe four years.
You know, Dadaism would kind of make a splash and then...
Dissipate, go off in other movements and things like this.
If you look at the art galleries, conceptual art, postmodern art, they've been doing the same stuff for maybe 40 or 50 years now.
If you look at women's studies, African-American studies, critical race theory, all this kind of stuff, Foucault.
I mean, it's obviously changing, so on and so forth, but it's had this staying power that it's almost become conservative.
And I think this is a great irony.
I don't know where avant-garde art can go.
I don't know how many times you need to, proverbially speaking, put a crucifix in piss.
It's one attempt to shock the bourgeoisie after another to the point that it becomes old and stale.
And certainly institutionalized in the sense of...
Millions of—or not millions, but many people will, you know, go get a Master's of Fine Arts at all these institutions and learn from the great masters of, you know, conceptual shock.
So this is a very—it's a very strange thing about our culture, where we have this conservatism amongst postmodern cultural Marxism.
Do you think this is going to break down, or do you think that even maybe, Jonathan, because political correctness has become so obvious or it's something easily ridiculed, that it's going to be overturned or at least come to an end?
Do you see that, or is that being a little too optimistic?
It might be a bit too optimistic in the short run.
I think it's become institutionized in a way which those art movements, which you characterized earlier on, have not been for several reasons.
One, it's a non-fictional area.
It's an academic area, and academics have tenure in mind.
These art movements are sudden, instantaneous, bohemian and largely outsider movements.
They usually row intensely with the major figures who sort of break from each other over a finite period.
Surrealism almost came to an end when Breton insisted that they all join the Communist Party in France that many of them didn't want to do.
They joined it for discussion and for alcoholic treats and to meet women and that sort of thing and to have a chance to exhibit.
And that's what most people join art movements for.
And it's also not particularly concerned with creation either.
It's concerned with reflexive creativity academically.
So somebody will go through the process of the first degree, the second degree, they'll get the PhD, which is influenced by one of these theoretical figures.
Then they'll become a tenured lecturer over time, and they provide a paradigm or a model for their students as they come up.
So the thing becomes replicating over a career path.
what you've had is you have a couple of generations who've now done this within the academy.
And they've also worked for a situation where there's very little kick against them because there's very little right wing left in the academy.
It's almost totally gone now.
It almost can't survive.
vows have been put on it to such a degree that it's almost impossible for it to survive.
And this has meant the rather desert-like arid terrain of the new left.
Small end, small L really, now dominates the tertiary sector of education.
This is why the left is so strong.
In a mass capitalist world where they feel that people are degraded by the cultural industry, nevertheless, what you might call the PBS culture, the National Endowments for the Arts culture, is completely saturated with this sort of material.
And there's little way to shake it at the present time unless they're radically disfunded or unless a way can be worked for forces of counterculture to enter the university space again.
Probably only on the internet is the space that they can now adopt.
And that, of course, is what's happened, all of these ideas.
Well, Jonathan, we are the counterculture.
I think that's one thing that's been clear to me for some time.
But thank you once again for being on the podcast.
This was a brilliant discussion, and I look forward to another one next week.
